6 charged with $9M scheme to bilk taxpayers

LOS ANGELES 
Six people have been charged with operating a $9 million health care scheme by moving healthy seniors into a San Fernando Valley hospice and billing Medicare and Medi-Cal for services never performed.

The defendants include a mother, the operator of the We Care hospice in Sherman Oaks, and her two grown children.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown says they paid healthy seniors to be admitted to the hospice, then billed state and federal health care programs for "phantom procedures."